m-Powering Development Initiative
Third Advisory Board Meeting-Second Cycle
London, United Kingdom
Speech by
Mr. Brahima Sanou, Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau
2 February 2018
Excellencies,
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
I am pleased to welcome you in London. I would like to thank you for joining us today for the 3rd Meeting of the Advisory Board.
Allow me to start by conveying special thanks to our distinguished Vice-Chair and Working Group Chair, Mr Lawrence Yanovitch for hosting our 3rd Advisory Board meeting. Lawrence, I thank you and your team for all the efforts you made to welcome us today in this beautiful setting.
Since the launch of this Initiative, we have shared many good moments. Today, I have the difficult task of starting our meeting by sharing some very sad news. Last December, we learned of the passing away of Mr Vanu Bose, an exceptional and passionate man who throughout his life committed to ensure that no one in rural areas is left behind. Vanu was a strong supporter of the m-Powering Initiative.
I invite you to observe a minute of silence in memory of Mr Vanu Bose.
I am very grateful that we will continue to benefit from his support through the participation, in our Board, of Mr Beard represented today by Ms Jones.
Dear friends,
As you know, last year was a landmark for Telecommunication Development Sector with the holding of the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC), in Buenos Aires, in October, under the theme "ICTs@SDGs". enabled ITU members to hold substantive discussions on reshaping the future of the ICT Sector and repositioning the ICT Sector in the new ecosystem. The Buenos Aires Declaration adopted at this WTDC sets our vision for the future and sends a strong message from the ICT community to the world about our contribution to the attainment of the SDGs.
In line with our goals, the conference reaffirmed the importance of joining forces to build a new ecosystem of opportunities for all based on access, affordability, collective thinking, collaboration, value creation, partnership building and innovation.
I am confident that the important work you have accomplished in the working groups so far and the concrete actions you have identified will enable us to move our agenda forward. We need to now think of the next steps and how we could put in practice what we developed, and implement pilot projects to foster socio and economic empowerment across sectors through ICTs.
As you know, we continue working more and more with our sister UN agencies: UNESCO on education, WHO on health, FAO on agriculture and ILO on digital skills for decent jobs.
This year, UNESCO's flagship education event, Mobile Learning Week in being organized in partnership with ITU under the theme "Skills in a connected world". The five day event will be held in Paris, from 26 to 30 March 2018. I count on your active participation!
This event provides a good opportunity to showcase our work stressing the importance of building synergies between ICTs and education and in working together to develop digital skills for a bright digital future!
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
I won't take more of your time, I look forward to hearing from your great achievements and contributions to the work of the Initiative. I am confident that the steps we will agree on will bring us closer to the objectives that we intend to achieve.
We have a unique opportunity to make a difference and I count on you to make it happen!
Thank you!
